Tactai In The News

October 27, 2017

Disruption of Retail to be a Reality with Virtual Reality

Silicon Valley is aiming to monetize VR with the likes of MasterCard, Swarovski, IKEA and Lowe’s Company playing a part. Tactai products like Tactai Touch preserve and provide a refined sense of touch in VR.

Will Virtual Reality Disrupt Retail? You Bet!

Imagine you're a retailer. Now imagine you had the magical power to make the shopping experience addictive, seamless, convenient and enjoyable. E-commerce started that transformation, but in a few short years the immersive world of virtual reality could finish it, turning even modern-day retail on its head.

The Future Is Close And You Can Feel It

Have you ever gotten so wrapped up in an immersive virtual experience that you reach out to touch something, and when you can’t this realisation immediately kills the illusion and takes you away from enjoying the experience? Tactai Touch offers a solution.

Why virtual reality still lacks the personal touch

Two weeks ago, I met two different Steves on two consecutive days.
Tuesday was Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple and the guy who personally designed the company’s early computers, right down to the circuit boards. Wednesday was Steven Domenikos, the cofounder of Tactai, a tiny Waltham startup that has raised about $2 million to try to introduce a sense of touch into digital interactions — like feeling a silk dress or snakeskin boot as you shop for clothing online.

Virtual Touch: Inside Technology That Makes VR Feel Real

Touch is the most underrated of all of our senses. From walking to sitting to sleeping, you are constantly using your sense of touch to adjust your motions so that you complete the task you're working on, whether that's swiping your tablet screen to read this story, adjusting the chair you're sitting on or picking up a mug to take a sip of coffee.

Feel Me

The Queen of Haptics is Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, the brilliant Stanford-trained engineer who oversees the haptics group at the GRASP lab and supervised Culbertson’s work. The daughter of a developmental psychologist—and, one is not surprised to learn, a member of the Stanford volleyball team that twice won N.C.A.A. titles—she recognizes the gratifyingly large number of women engineers in haptics.

On eve of VR launches, hands-on with a new haptic ideal

One company's plan to bring touch to VR...
I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania's Levine Hall on the same day as a major AR / VR vendor, the week before the 2016 Game Developers Conference. I wasn't told what vendor this was — though I'm told the company has NDAs signed with eight separate vendors and, if you count up the companies active in the space, there aren't too many. We were there to see a product from a company called Tactai that promised to solve one of the space's most pressing issues: the absence of touch.